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All exception and no rule
Aug. 25th, 2014 04:29 pmVia ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
umadoshi, a really excellent post on loving Narnia despite its flaws: How To Get Back to Narnia.
I was talking about the Narnia books with a friend the other day, and I mentioned that I loved them, present-tense, as in I re-read them every few years. It's a different kind of relationship, where I read them more to deconstruct them than to escape into them, but that's different than outright rejection.
I think Narnia might have been my first experience with Your Fave Is Problematic, a training ground for experiencing a geek culture that, while appealing, doesn't exactly like or represent my sort of person (and is even more hostile the more marginalized one is). Unlike the author, I got the religious anvil at a very early age (as in it was clear to me that the Dwarves at the end were Jews), and managed to be offended by the sexism and racism on first read, which at least in the case of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, may very well have happened before I learned to read. And yet I still somehow identified and kept coming back to them as escapism even when they were equally the source of outrage.
It's kind of how I can reconcile critique and love, and why I occasionally probably come off as too easy going and then snap into buzzkill territory on a moment's notice. Lotsa practice.
umadoshi, a really excellent post on loving Narnia despite its flaws: How To Get Back to Narnia.I was talking about the Narnia books with a friend the other day, and I mentioned that I loved them, present-tense, as in I re-read them every few years. It's a different kind of relationship, where I read them more to deconstruct them than to escape into them, but that's different than outright rejection.
I think Narnia might have been my first experience with Your Fave Is Problematic, a training ground for experiencing a geek culture that, while appealing, doesn't exactly like or represent my sort of person (and is even more hostile the more marginalized one is). Unlike the author, I got the religious anvil at a very early age (as in it was clear to me that the Dwarves at the end were Jews), and managed to be offended by the sexism and racism on first read, which at least in the case of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, may very well have happened before I learned to read. And yet I still somehow identified and kept coming back to them as escapism even when they were equally the source of outrage.
It's kind of how I can reconcile critique and love, and why I occasionally probably come off as too easy going and then snap into buzzkill territory on a moment's notice. Lotsa practice.
